Where there’s brass there’s muck, and where there’s muck there is usually a rake. The Daily Telegraph’s exposure of England’s football boss, Sam Allardyce, was just about fair within journalism’s code of conduct. There was prima facie suspicion of wrongdoing and no other way of securing evidence.
The former Football Association chairman David Bernstein when asked about corruption in football this morning kept saying that “nothing is proven”. But that is the trouble with international sport. Nothing is ever proven if left to self-regulation. Look at the Olympics, Fifa, cycling, cricket, athletics. All have been to varying degrees rotten. It has taken journalists – mostly British ones – to subject them to at least rudimentary accountability.
I have some sympathy for Allardyce. Reading and listening between the lines of the Telegraph material, it is clear that he moves with ease through the murkier reaches of big-time football. But the chit-chat among covert reporters who had carefully cultivated his confidence is not the same as criminal, fraudulent or, in the context, inappropriate behaviour.
Discussing the various ways round the transfer rules must be routine among agents and managers. Bad-mouthing colleagues in private is hardly a hanging crime. The specific offer of cash for consultancy, as Allardyce emphasised, was something he would “have to run by” his seniors at the FA. As for bungs and bribes, he could hardly have been more explicit in condemning them: “I haven’t heard that. I haven’t heard that, you stupid man. What are you talking about? … You daren’t even think about it.” The sting was justified, but whether the offences were sacking offences must be doubtful.
The truth of the matter is that these sports reek of money, and money unregulated or uncontrolled soon reeks of corruption. In the absence of self-discipline, and shielded by dubious members of the accountancy profession, these organisations have only one thing to fear – and that is embarrassment. Allardyce this week committed the one capital crime: he embarrassed the FA.
The affair recalls the fate of David Triesman, Bernstein’s predecessor as chairman of the FA prior to 2010. Triesman was taped commenting on the corruption of various Fifa members before the ill-fated venture of Gordon Brown and then David Cameron to try to “win” the 2018 World Cup for England. His furious FA colleagues forced him to resign, on which the then sports minister, Hugh Robertson, congratulated them.
I will never forget the faces on England’s “three lions”, Cameron, David Beckham and Prince William, later that year in Zurich. They had been derisorily locked out of hosting the 2018 World Cup, and looked like dead men walking. The BBC and the Sunday Times had told them the voting was corrupt. They were gullible to the point of negligence. They had even tried to censor the BBC for revealing their forthcoming humiliation.
Many of Triesman’s allegations were subsequently shown to be true. Many of those who voted against England have now resigned or face prosecution. Did the FA apologise or invite Triesman back? No. Did the FA refuse all further dealings with Sepp Blatter’s blatantly corrupt Fifa? No.
I cannot take seriously sports I used to love when I cannot trust what I see before my eyes. I was baffled at the reason for last-minute player substitutions in football matches, until I was told these were fee-sharing deals. Cricket’s dropped catches and no-balls turned out to be paid for. British cyclists who suddenly won gold medals had superior equipment to other competitors. How did Qatar get to hold a summer World Cup, or Russia a winter Olympic games? You can guess. Are we soon to learn that referees are bribed for the inexplicable penalties that decide most rugby matches?
Supranational governance suffers the blight of unaccountability. No one is responsible to anyone. A tide of money rises to cover every sin. Unaccountability afflicts the United Nations and its agencies. It afflicts the European Union. It afflicts organised religion and international charity. But sport is especially afflicted because it is flush with television revenue and glory sanitised by the political prestige of global triumph.
George Orwell referred to sport as “bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence” – and he was writing when it was amateur. Now there is money at stake, Cameron had to fawn at Sepp Blatter’s door, and confer on IOC bosses the extraordinary honour of Olympic traffic “Zil lanes” across London. Murky organisations may claim to be overseeing “ethics”. But why pay them any heed? When Russia is halfheartedly thrown out of the 2016 Olympics, it retaliates with that new weapon of international conflict, the hacked email and leaked health record. That should make the IOC quake.
These bodies are run by self-perpetuating cliques sustained in various tax havens by other self-perpetuating cliques in member states. Fifa was rumbled last year only when the media gathered enough evidence for Swiss police, on behalf of the US authorities, to arrest its officials for “racketeering, wire fraud, money laundering and corruption” over many decades. The FA cannot have been unaware of the stink of corruption emanating from Fifa.
As long as the financial and political rewards to international sport are so inflated, it is doubtful whether its rulers will ever truly come clean. The IOC has yet to purge doping in its sports and probably never will. The concept of what is a drug and what is performance enhancement is forever changing. The remedy for an honest sport, or an honest country, is to decline to collaborate with these international junkets. They should play “friendlies” and hope against hope that Fifa and the IOC will one day go the way of cock-fighting and all-in wrestling. The moral is never to trust a governor you cannot remove with a vote.
Everyone in “football street” appeared to know what Allardyce was talking about. They just did not like it being known by others. As long as these people indulge the greed of international sport, the only discipline they will acknowledge is embarrassment. That is why the only person they really fear is the investigative journalist.
